On Tor

            You may have heard of Tor, which stands for The Onion Router. As this blog is addressed to the Average Person I imagine you have heard of it, only you don’t know, not really, what it is. Why onions?

            Well, let me ask you, have you ever opened your pantry door only to be crushed beneath an avalanche of onions? Have you ever, one fine morning in summer, thrown open your back door and gasped, finding your garden colonized over night by shallots? Have you, you Average Man or Woman, like me, packed away box after box of onions in your attic, others in your closet, still more in your shed, and one in each shoe, and still there’s no end in sight, just more and more onions, and market day isn’t till Saturday? Do you have to wear goggles in your own house? And do your in-laws refuse to cross your threshold but stand there on the porch, pinching their stinging noses, evincing the most withering judgement of your onion management? Are you, in short, in need of some means of routing these surplus onions directly to market?

If so, then consider The Onion Router, by KitchenAid! etc. etc. . .

            So, OK, what Tor actually is, is a tool for anonymizing your activity online. You can find a good description of how it works here , but put simply, Tor hurls your internet traffic across a vast volunteer overlay network; that is, your traffic is sent skipping from node to node, computer to computer, gaining a mask or layer each time, and further embedding your identity in the center, so to speak, of a giant digital onion. A casual snoop won’t manage to peel those layers; they will be able, however, to identify that you have used the Tor browser. And that has its own risks.

Let’s first review a little Tor history. Samuel Tor, a small-time onion farmer and a rather masterful onion carver, producing scrimshaw of such beautiful intricacy you would cry to see them and hold them in your hands, not just from the fumes; this young Mr. Tor one day while whistling the Colonel Bogey March unthinkingly threw open the door of his pantry and was immediately buried in onions. “If only,” he said, sitting up and sneezing, “if only I had a means of routing all these damned onions!”

Etc. etc. . .

But seriously, Tor, or “onion routing,” germinated in the ‘90’s, cultivated first by the US Navy and then DARPA, before some civilians took the promising sprout and planted it in the private sector, back in 2004; then it really began to thrive. In recent years, following Snowden’s revelations, use of the Tor Browser has rocketed. It’s run by a non-profit these days.

And what do you get from it, why use it?

The short answer is, you get anonymity. That may or may not matter to you. If you’re doing something naughty online, something primitive but nonetheless common and quite human, in that case you might just open an incognito or secret window. Tor isn’t really necessary for all that. But if you have objections to corporations’ swarms of trackers, if the persistent marksmanship of the targeted ads in your inbox has begun to unnerve you, or if you have moral objections to the various snoops out there, or if, as I -wrote about last week-, you can, quite simply, imagine finding yourself suddenly, strangely, uncharacteristically desiring utter secrecy; in any or all of these cases you’ll want to be aware of the Tor Browser as an option.

But masking your traffic through the Tor Network entails certain drawbacks. First, the process itself of masking via relays, of leaping from node to node, will slow your browsing down noticeably.

But second, and more worth pausing over, the very use of a Tor Browser attracts attention. The NSA assumes anyone who uses it is a foreign national, and proceeds accordingly.

I should point out that this doesn't mean the NSA can actually get you through the Tor network; only that they are alerted, and will perhaps try other means, as they have before. 

I imagine two agents sitting in an unmarked sedan, surveilling suburban America.

“Look at this one, Roy,” says one, pointing to the rolling data on his laptop, from the top of which sprouts a small, rotating satellite dish. “Using Tor, the terrorist.”

            His partner snarls in response, chewing on a match. Roy’s the loose cannon of the two, drinks Redbull like its water. “They’re everywhere,” he says, making a fist. “Like roaches. Turns my stomach, Dan.”

            “Mine, too.” Dan closes his laptop. “Let’s roll out.”

            “Son. Of. A. Bitch!” Something else has caught Roy’s attention. He jerks his chin toward the tinted window. Across the street, in a cul-de-sac, a woman has just carried groceries into her home, closing the door behind her. Right before their eyes, she draws the curtains.

“See that!” The match snaps between Roy’s teeth. “The brazen terrorist!”

            “Has to be ISIS,” his partner nods. “That level of depravity. In broad daylight.”

“Curtains, curtains!” Roy says and tosses back a Redbull in one gulp. “Of all the miserable, low-down, dirty terrorist tricks . . .”

He shakes his head and continues resolutely, solemnly, as they cock their pistols in unison, “You know, Dan, I’m going to enjoy this one . . . Yes, I’m going to savor it.”